Non-Technical Founders Will Always Make Subpar Products That Fail Slowly

"We are always going to build subpar products because neither of
us can code," the two discussed.

Lessin explained: Idea people who can't code have to relay their
vision to others, and part of the vision inevitably gets lost in
translation.

Lessin said non-technical founders like he and Westheimer fail
slowly.

Westheimer, who had been considering founding a new startup and
already had an investor on board, took a step back.

He had assumed learning to code in his late 20's was impossible.
"Maybe in another life I would have been a good developer," he
used to think.

Speaking with Lessin made him change his mind. He called off the
investor and told him he wasn't going to pursue the startup.
Instead, Westheimer took to books and started to learn back-end
development. He was fueled by a product he wanted to build
-- an online meeting management system called OHours.

Two years later, Westheimer is working on another startup,
Picturelife. Instead of
being the product manager like he used to be, Westheimer is the
back-end developer. He's working on Picturelife with
OMGPOP founder Charles Forman and Threadless co-founder Jacob Dehart.

Forman told him, "I'm glad you learned to code, otherwise we
wouldn't have been able to work together." Forman and
Dehart are both technical guys with a lot of ideas and designing
talent, Westheimer explained. They didn't need another idea guy,
they needed a developer who could pull weight.

Now, even if Picturelife becomes a big company, Westheimer wants
to stay a developer. "If you had asked me one year ago, I would
have said I'd go back to product management, but this is my thing
now," he says. "I love being able to push things live immediately
instead of filing a ticket for a release four weeks out." He's
able to instantly help customers with product ideas they have,
which he finds rewarding.

Westheimer offers some advice for non-technical founders:

If you think you don't need to learn to code, think
again. Westheimer receives a lot of requests from
non-technical founders looking for developers. To them he
responds, "I run a 22,000-person group full of technical people
so I'm pretty well connected. I couldn't even find a technical
person right now. And if I can't find a technical person,
neither can you. You need to learn to code."

If you don't learn to code, accept that you won't be as
successful. Westheimer was driven to learn to code by
the notion that he'd be a failure as an entrepreneur without
that skill. Failure for him wasn't an option.

Have an idea in mind when you start learning to
code. If he hadn't had known he wanted to build
OHours, Westheimer thinks he'd have quit learning to code.
Ideas are motivating.

Don't focus on coding "the right way."
Westheimer says the first time he showed Forman OHours code,
Forman laughed. "It was so poorly written, but you know
what? It worked. And that's all that matters," says
Westheimer. Like anything else, the code you write will
inevitably improve with time and practice. Things Westheimer developed six months ago
embarrass him now, but it's all part of the learning process.

Books are still the best way to learn.
Westheimer says he tried online tutorials like Codecademy and
MIT classes. Books were still the best solutions.
Codecademy taught basic Javascript concepts but didn't give
actionable advice Westheimer needed. Instead he looked
for books that taught people to develop products or features.
Westheimer tweaked those lessons to fit his product's needs.